WSU: Free Will and Neuroscience with Alfred Mele

Has neuroscience all but disproved the existence of free will? Philosopher Alfred Mele argues that free will is still alive and well as he critically analyzes experimental data. #WorldSciU

This lecture was recorded on May 30, 2015 at the World Science Festival in New York City

[RStell-wtqr]

Who's Will? And what did they lock him up for?

[johnjacquard]

its like saying "color" does not exist there is no such thing. instead there is wavelength with frequency and our brain converst this signal in our brain we interpret it as color.
that is not saying color does not exist it is .

[StaticBlaster]

Can't believe how fast 19 years flies.

[johnjacquard]

free will, you dont want to get into the semantics? lol ( semantics means the meaning of the linguistic symbol)
well maybe you should get into the meaning if you saying something does not exist but then wont say what you even mean buy that linguistic symbol used to represent information, .

because we have a unconscious does not refute free will.
this is ridiculous.
you have a incredibly intelligent person ( in a narrow context ), that is behaving incredibly unintelligent regarding free will. why?
very bizarre.

so many fallacies going on and lack of critical thinking.

[christianheichel]

He asked the question what do we do if there's no free will. The answer if there's no free will is, whatever a marble in motion on a hill will do because it has no free will. The marble will continue rolling downhill. The collection of cells that make the bodies will continue moving in the directions they've been going with no purpose, right, or wrong.
That sounds horribly bleak.

[petrairene]

There are people who develop substance addiction and they are able to one day decide that they no longer want that and despite severe phyiscal and psychological withdraw symptoms they are able to quit. So apparently the will to change something gives some people the strength to go against established patterns successfully.

[christopherneelyakagoattmo]

I say that there is free will simply because we as society craft law out of chaos. We look at a chaotic random world of human behavior and make arbitrary lines, e.g. such as the age of 18 as adulthood. Then we agree to abide by these rules and their consequences. On an individual level, we decide whether or not to abide by the laws or not. Most of us do: and then we dtermine the changes that need to happen in that social contract.

[redhidinghood]

You just need to know physics/neuroscience and its pretty simple free will doesnt exist. However, believing and living convinced free will doesnt exist is bad and maybe even impossible. The best way to thibk about it is that free will exists but is limited.

[bergsofcanada]

Okay! I've been waiting for the video like this for a while, thank you Alfred! A good job was done here of pointing out all of the fallacies in the argument that there is no free will. I like how he points out the incongruity of various arguments. Human beings, or any sufficiently conscious entity, definitely has free will. The next thing about this entire discussion is how disingenuous people have been in the past about those two words. Free will. I have looked at so many discussions and studies about this, and many people deserve to be slapped down for their gross misuse of those two words. Besides another way to describe this delay between the subconscious forwarding the impetus for Action to the conscious, is basically system latency. I have noticed this system latency occurring in myself throughout my life. Look up a competent description of system latency, and then look at the description that the claimants who would say we have no free will are making. The phenomenon to me just shows that we have system latency

[TheAngiepangie]

I love this topic! Sam Harris opened my eyes about the illusion. I’ve had some very heated conversations about this. Thank you for sharing!

[johnjacquard]

external measurements have no connection to free will.
its a categorical mistake .

[guillermobrand]

Before we consciously know about something, our unconscious already knew about it.
To understand the above, it is convenient to explain what conscious action is about.
Matter only exists in the Present.
Actions take place in the Present.
To carry out actions, living beings with a brain capture information from their relevant material environment through their senses. This information is processed by the brain, activating memories (groups of neurons) associated with the information captured, acquiring meaning what is perceived. Simultaneously, action expectations are generated (Pavlovian conditioning).
We will call the mental correlate of the relevant material environment, which represents what is happening in the Present, "reality of the Individual".
Although the brain manages information from the Present, the Past and a possible Future, the brain is not confused, and manages to differentiate between the Past, the Present and a possible Future.
The green monkeys of Central Africa use three types of sounds as warning signals in their language. When a monkey hears the alert signal for an eagle, it integrates itself into that segment of its mental correlate of the relevant medium that represents the airspace, an eagle, which leads the monkey to raise its head and using its sight it tries to locate spatially to the predator, thereby improving their survival prospects by reducing uncertainty.
From his life experience, my dog's brain stores information on various entities, generating a biography of these entities. So then, my dog knows how to differentiate between my different siblings, the postman, the neighbor's cat, etc. When I get home, my dog watches me and is able to recognize my mood. When I arrive in a good mood, my dog jumps on me. When I don't arrive in a good mood, then he lies on the ground with his tail between his legs. His life experience in which I have participated, that is, the biography that his brain manages of me, allows him to make an adequate projection of the future and carry out actions according to the circumstances.
In the first four years of life, a child hears between ten and forty million words.
When the mother tells her child the story of Little Red Riding Hood, for the child's brain Little Red Riding Hood is very real. Just as the green monkey that listens to the alert signal for an eagle does not need to see the eagle for said predator to be integrated into the mental correlate of its relevant environment, in a child it does not need to see Little Red Riding Hood to integrate it into its mental correlate.
When adults speak to the child mentioning his name (for example Pedrito), and refer to actions that the child is not carrying out at that moment (tomorrow we will go to the beach Pedrito), his brain places the entity Pedrito being on the beach, in the Present you are living. In turn, when adults speak to the child mentioning his name and refer to actions that the child is carrying out at that moment, his brain attributes both his body and the entity Pedro said action.
Gradually, in the child's brain, an increasingly strong association is established between his body and the entity Pedrito, but a complete fusion between his body and said entity is never established. This is because the function of the brain is to administer bodily actions that take place in the Present, and on occasions the child hears that they refer to the entity Pedrito carrying out future or past actions, actions in which the material body of the child not participate.
During wakefulness, in the brain of a ten-year-old boy, Pedrito's biography is permanently activated. This entity is given to perform actions that are not taking place in the Present. In this sense, the entity Pedrito (the Being) is capable of "dwelling" in timeless and immaterial worlds. This does not happen with Pedrito's material body. His body is a "slave of the Present". Being able to carry out actions in timeless and immaterial worlds meant an extraordinary "evolutionary leap" for the human being. Thanks to human language, Reason and Being arose.
Thanks to language, the mental correlate of the relevant environment of a human is significantly expanded, since it not only represents what is happening in the material environment but also those "mental scenarios" that, without being part of the world of matter, represent the "worlds of matter". timeless and immaterial in which the Being is given to carry out actions. The brain assumes, in an unconscious process, that in these immaterial and timeless scenarios it is the Being who carries out actions and integrates said life experience into the life biography of the Being. A similar process happens when, for example, a dog watches a bird fly, an opportunity in which the brain integrates the dog's life experience, the bird's act of flying, in turn, integrates as its own life experience, that of watch the bird fly.
We make use of Reason every time we make use of language, be it speaking, thinking, listening to speak, reading, or using sign language. Through it we can generate mental correlates that represent the reality of the Pedrito entity, a reality that is no longer a slave to the Present. That entity is the conscious entity.
To an adult's unconscious, the conscious entity, the Self, is "very real." Our unconscious “does not think”. We think using language, and our brain assumes, in an unconscious process, that the action of thinking is not our own, but of the Being. Our unconscious “does not know” that the Being is a fiction of our mind.

[jakubzneba]

free will is just mental construct, so it is subjective, so definition is for me to create not for some comrado...next?

[tofu-munchingCoalition.ofChaos]

To be honest I don't even know an idealised structure which satisfies my intuition about free will.
So there is not only a problem with free will in contemporary physics or from experimental data. There is no model for free will it seems to me.

[blcrlinkd]

Neuroscientists: Decisions happens before actions, there can’t be free will.

[SuperPuzzler]

So... what even IS free will anyway? That's the one thing that I've never gotten a clear answer on.

[johnjacquard]

to say there is no feee will would be like saying there is no such thing as a " motion picture" ( the person says that because all we have is 24 images changing per second, there is no such tjing as a motion picture because in reality its 24 separate frozen images per second giving the " illusion" of a motion picture but in reality there is no movement

this is ridiculous.

motion picture is a figure of speech . it exists we enjoy them .

just in the same way free will is a demonstrably true.


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[prisonss]

The judicial system and will the bible thumping crackpots need to watch this....6 billion views!!

[bobaldo]

Free will is a ludicrous concept, IMO . Limited freewill, or free will in certain circumstances, etc. is like saying pigs can fly, or sort of fly under certain circumstances, etc. If a "decision" is a real event in the real universe it is subject to the same laws of physics as any other event in the real universe. If a "decision" is not an event in the real universe it can have no effect on events in the real universe.

[karendusang]

Could it possibly be because we start programming our forecasted reactions to certain actions from birth and continue this throughout our lives?